Reluctant Writers' Club: Amazing Animals

For many students, writing assignments are a source of anxiety and frustrations.  Students who are lacking foundational writing and organizational skills often feel so overwhelmed with the idea of writing that they don't even know where to begin.  In this class, I will use high interest topics and research based writing instructional format to help students build a strong foundation of writing skills.

Each week we will learn about a different animal and students will apply their learning to various writing exercises designed to facilitate analytical thinking about the animal.  The topics for each weekly class will be based on student interest.  I encourage students to share any topic that they would like to learn more about in upcoming classes.  While I may not be able to fulfill all student requests, I will do my best to accommodate as many as possible.  

At the beginning of each class, we will read about and discuss the week's animal for the first 15 minutes of the class.  Student participation is highly encouraged, although not required.  Once students have a basic understanding of the topic, we will move on to sentence and paragraph writing activities designed to deepen their understanding of the topic, as well as improve their critical thinking and, of course, writing skills.  These activities are designed to help students who struggle with starting their writing by giving students various starting off points that can be applied to any type of writing.   The focus of the class is on improving sentence and single paragraph writing as these are basic building blocks of writing.  Students who feel confident in writing sentences will be far better equipped to write longer more in depth writings for school.

Each class will be fresh and different with a new and interesting animal to learn about.  Students are welcome to join the class at any time.  As long as students are able to write a complete simple sentence (For example, "The car is red."), they will be able to grasp the content being taught.  The level of difficulty will be determined by each student's individual abilities.

Writing activities will vary each week to include:
Writing compound and complex sentences
Expanding and combining sentences
Varying sentence structure by using introductory clauses and appositive phrases
Using basic and subordinating conjunctions to show relationships between ideas in writing
Single paragraph outlines
Single paragraph summaries